“Yes, you could,” replied his mother. “You could run faster than they could for a while, but you do not know the patience of wolves, my dear. You would have run so hard and so fast that presently you would have tired yourself out so that the wolves would have had no trouble in catching you. Ever since you were a little fawn I have told you about the wolves, and that they are our worst enemies; but I don’t think you ever have believed it. Now you have seen them and you know what they are like. The wolves are very smart people. They watch for a deer to stray away. Then they get between the herd and that deer. When this happens, that deer will not live long.”
“Have the deer always been afraid of the wolves?” asked Little Spot.
“Ever since the days when the world was young,” replied his mother.
“Tell me about the days when the world was young,” begged Little Spot.
For a few moments his mother said nothing. Gradually, into her big, dark eyes there crept a far-away look. “Once upon a time,” she began at last, “the world was mostly water, like the salt water that you saw in the summer.”
“But where did the deer live then?” interrupted Little Spot.
“There were no deer then,” said his mother. “There were no deer and there were no wolves and there were none of those two-legged creatures called men. You see, Old Mother Nature had not made them yet, for there was no land for them to live on. But by and by there was land and then for a very long time Old Mother Nature was very, very busy making the different kinds of people to live on the land. Some of these people she made to live where it was summer all the year round.”
You should have seen Little Spot’s big ears prick up at that. “Is there such a place?” he cried.
His mother nodded. “Yes,” said she, “I am told there is a land where it is summer all the time. How do you think you would like that?”
Little Spot thought it over for a moment. “I shouldn’t like it,” he decided. “Why, if it is summer all the time, there can be no snow! What a queer land it must be without the beautiful snow. I shouldn’t like it.”